Newmont Mining Corporation - Essay Example

?Case analysis Case analysis Summary of the case Newmont Mining Corporation is a mining company that is located greenwood village, Colorado, USA. It is one of the largest producers of gold in the world. It has active mines in Nevada, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Ghana and Peru. Its holdings include Santa Fe Gold, Battle Mountain Gold, Normandy Mining, Franco-Nevada Corp and Fronteer Gold. Newmont also has many joint venture relationships with different countries around the globe. Newmont Mining Corporation was founded 1916 in New York by Colonel William Boyce Thompson as a holding company which its main aim was to invest in worldwide mineral, oil, and related companies. The name “Newmont” is a portmanteau “new York” and “Montana” that is according to company lore and it reflects where the founder , Thompson, made his fortune and where he grew up. Interests overseas were then acquired over certified reasons and in about the middle of 20th century, it had a controlling interest in the Tsumeb mine in Namibia and in the O'Okiep Copper Company in Namaqualand, South Africa. Today, Newmont Corporation remains as the only standing gold company in the standard and poor’s 500 index (Newmont Company History, 2013). Since it is a mining company, it has established a set of tenets that cover human health, education and rights, community involvement, transparency and accountability and local employment (Kotler & Lee, 2004). The firm’s initiative deals with education and health and most works in the company are done by the local people. This is because the company believes it has a duty to give back to the community. Newmont Company has received funding from the international finance corporation. However, it had to agree that it will fully comply with the international rules on safety and health, natural ecosystems, worker safety, handling of dangerous materials, proclamation programs and water resources. Through the company’s relocation initiative, it offered an important assistance to the local population in the sense that it helped them relocate to safer places, gave them priority in hiring of workers and engagement in numerous assistance initiatives administered the firm’s rural development initiative. It is also significant to note that the firm has engaged in reclamation programs in its mine in Peru but it encountered difficulty when the fragile alpine ecosystem made reclamation hard and expensive. Key stakeholders Newmont Mining Corporation has a wide listed number of stakeholders as stated below. Bruce R. Brook who currently serves as a Director for Boart Longyear Pty. Ltd., Programmed Group (as Chairman) and CSL Limited and also a member of the Financial Reporting Council in Australia and the Audit Committee of the Salvation Army (Southern Command, Australia). Vincent A. Calarco is Director of the Consolidated Edison and CPG International Inc. Mr. Calarco is Newmont's independent Chairman of the Board.he works with other stakeholders in Newmont. Joseph A. Carrabba is the Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of Cliffs Natural Resources (formerly known as Cleveland-Cliffs Inc). Gary J. Goldberg who was appointed President and Chief Executive Officer and joined the Board of Directors of Newmont Mining Corporation on March 1, 2013. Veronica Hagen is Chief Executive Officer and a member of the board of directors of Polymer Group, Inc. since April 2007. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Southern Company. Simon R. Thompson is currently a non-executive director of Sandvik AB (Sweden) and Amec plc (UK). He was a non-executive director of AngloGold Ashanti Ltd (South Africa) from 2004 to 2008 and of United Company Rusal (Russia) from 2007 to 2009 (Newont Company History, 2013). Ethical issues in the case Ethics is an important aspect in a business organization. For a certain company to grow and achieve its visions, missions, targets or goals and objectives, it must set its ethics programs apart from the principles and rules governing it. Most common ethical issues governing a certain company are set to be honesty, integrity, consistency, respect and so on. With regards to Newmont Mining Corporation, it has set its code of conduct in a straight forward manner in order to ensure accountability in its operations. Integrity is one of them which states that the employees must work within the set strength and with a lot of knowledge to achieve the set visions and missions (Paine, 2008). Believe in integrity achieves big benefits so long as employees work within this perimeter. The employees in Newmont Mining Corporation have contributed to the success of the corporation due to their adherence to integrity. The company can be blamed for being ego centric in the sense that following the Choropampa incident when mercury fell from the truck, the company offered local citizens $ 30 per kilometer to pick the mercury with their bare hands without offering them protective clothes or training in the safe picking of mercury. Ethically, the firm did not care about the welfare of the people since they were exposed to mercury which could cause health problems. Warning from the United States environmental protection agency stated that elemental mercury is dangerous in that can cause severe and serious health problems such as irritability, excessive shyness, nervousness and mood swings, insomnia and neuromuscular changes. More than 100 local people were sickened by the exposure to the elemental mercury which caused memory loss, blindness, muscular pain and other health problems (Porter & Kramer, 2007). The Choropampa incident led to social environmental cost to the local community. However, after the incident, the company looked for ways to rebuild its broken trust among local population where it vowed to act and operate in a socially responsible manner. It was ethically and socially right when the company decided to engage in a continuous enhancement in its operations where it lowered its costs and increased efficiency. This action has been extended to areas of social responsibility where it aims to improve the lives of local population (Kotler & Lee, 2004). Teamwork on the other hand is taken as a beneficiary in the company. Employees in Newmont have been working as a team over years contributing to its success. This is evidenced by consultancy, giving advice to fellow workmates, helping others when in need, and generally giving moral support. Newmont Mining Corporation defines respect as the main feature to enable employees work on the same base, employees give respect to one another in the line of duty or even out of duty. Newmont employees have levels from the managing level to non staff members but respect prevails through the respectful levels. Respect to each employee’s job is applied making work to swiftly flow. This encourages the organization to expand its claws in to several parts of the world thus increasing its business (Paine, 2008). Ethical traditions or perspectives that may be contributing to the conflict between the stakeholders, and/or that are making it difficult for the organization to make a decision? Newmont Mining Organization is unable to reach certain decisions or targets due to some ethical traditions. These issues pulls down the development of this corporation since decision making is slow hence achievable goals are achieved due to late or no implementation is made. Accountability of the employees to their esteemed work is inefficient in Newmont. Some of the employees work with no accountability for example they work with less seriousness and whenever a fault appears no one tends to accept the mistake and be corrected. This has made Newmont to slow down its decisions thus lowering its operations. In finance sectors, there are several faults in finance accounting due to some greed or preferably corruption of the members involved yet they don’t accept their mistake. This shows that they are not accountable for what they are supposed to do. Some employees in Newmont lack a consistent approach to program components. This is linked to ignorance to some operational skills in the Newmont Corporation. These employees lack information on how to operate some of the processes in the corporation. They lack or ignore to take rightful step of seeking assistance on how to undergo such process. This leads to repetition which creates laxity in work (Porter & Kramer, 2007). Recommendation Employees should show their consistency and accountability measures during work because such approaches make it the firm to understand and embrace ethics within the organization. Good ethical measures will see Newmont achieve its set targets and succeed over other mining corporations. Further, I think, the company should adopt consistent training of workers for specific work on how operable processes are done. This would create awareness and reduce repetition. Additionally, I would recommend that Newmont employees evaluate and re-evaluate themselves on what they are capable of doing and what they cannot do with little supervision. This in turn creates less supervision and also creates time and space for other processes to be done. References Kotler, P & Lee, N. (2004). Corporate social responsibility: Doing the most good for your company and your cause. New York, NY: Wiley. Newmont Company History. Retrieved 9th October 2013 from http://www.newmont.com/our- investors/shareholder-services. Paine, L (2008). Ethics: A basic framework. New York, NY: Harvard Business Review. Porter, M & Kramer, M. (2007). Strategy and Society: The link between competitive  advantage and corporate social responsibility. New York, NY: Harvard Business Review Read More